DR Congo killings by Rwandan army may be genocide, UN report says

Crimes carried out by the Rwandan army and allied rebels in Democratic Republic of Congo could be classified as genocide, a draft UN report has said.

The most serious claims target Rwanda, whose forces, along with Congolese troops, allegedly shot, clubbed and axed to death tens of thousands of ethnic Hutu refugees Photo: AFP/GETTY

5:08PM BST 27 Aug 2010

UN investigators uncovered mass human rights abuses in Congo in the 1990s, including the possible genocide of Hutu refugees by Rwandan forces.

Details of massacres, rapes and looting by forces from various countries in two wars that rocked the former Zaire between 1993 and 2003 were recorded in a report by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR).

The most serious claims target Rwanda, whose forces, along with Congolese troops, allegedly shot, clubbed and axed to death tens of thousands of ethnic Hutu refugees in Congo, including women, children and the elderly, from 1996 to 1998.

The UN investigated massacres by these forces as long ago as 1997, according to a report received by AFP in 2005, but its efforts were disrupted by the subsequent outbreak of war and that report was never officially published.

The total number of victims of war crimes by various forces operating in the country, known since 1997 as the Democratic Republic of Congo, is "probably several tens of thousands," the UNHCHR report said, according to a report in Le Monde, the French newspaper.

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After the genocide of minority Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, about a million Hutus fearing reprisals fled across the western border to Congo. Rwandan Tutsi forces raided refugee camps there in search of Hutu genocide leaders.

Le Monde quoted the UNHCHR report as saying that "the systematic and generalised attacks (against Hutus in Congo) have several damning aspects which, if proved by a competent court, could qualify as crimes of genocide."

"The use of non-firearms, mainly hammers, and the systematic massacres of survivors after camps were captured show that the number of dead is not attributable to the hazards of war," it quoted the report as saying.

Le Monde cited unnamed Congolese sources as saying that some of the people involved in the alleged abuses still held positions of power in the country.